jazz 13 post- scraping
4:52 PM: just before leaving the studio to take our creek walk, i went over to jazz 13 and did some scraping. that broke up the realist aspect of the composition and laid the groundwork for what i’ll be doing tomorrow morning.
the eye more easily perceives this as a composition rather than a brd, a nude, an athlete….
jazz 13 as it looked this afternoon at the end of my painting day.
1:59 PM: i’m having to change all the jazz series numbers because jazz 5 wasn’t viable to i dropped it from the series.
i feel complete with jazz 12, which i completed 2 days ago. yesterday was all about logistics, so i didn’t paint. i needed a break anyway. so this morning i started jazz 13, which has the same dimensions as the rest of the series: 35x37”/89x94cm. i think it’s a good start, and tomorrow will be a critical day because it’s hard to know whether i can get back into the groove i was in today.
the creature to the right of the tennis player is actually a bird, believe it or not! it’s from my growing collection of over 200 images of mostly rare birds found throughout the world.
i’m beginning to see my huge collection of photos as source material, more and more valued, for the new paintings in the jazz series. they lead me into the unknown, a little like a game of chess with ever shifting pieces which have ever shifting ways of moving about the board, or in this case the composition. if they start getting too predictable, i scrape or paint over them. perhaps a more accurate analogy would be JAZZ, which of course is the title of the series. which takes us back to thelonious monk, the initial inspiration of the series. if you’ve never listened to his music, take a listen and maybe you’ll get where i’m coming from.